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This workshop introduces participants to the various ways of using authentic cultural texts and audio/video materials in Chinese language classrooms. Following the ACTFL guidelines, we will discuss the selection and sequencing of authentic cultural materials for students at different proficiency levels. We will illustrate how to use authentic materials to design interactive reading and listening comprehension tasks and create speaking and writing activities. We will examine some useful resources to find authentic materials for teaching Chinese. We plan on having a swap-shop session, so we invite participants to bring their own learner-centered activities that incorporate authentic cultural materials to share with others.

Registration is free for all participants, however there is limited seating.

Ryan Crotty is a fellow with the International Security Program and deputy director for defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His work focuses on the management and application of defense resources, the strategic implications of resourcing decisions, and the effects of these decisions on the defense industrial base. He has worked on several CSIS projects focused on long-term defense spending trends and the defense budget draw down and identifying challenges and opportunities facing the Department of Defense in a time of budget tightening. He also studies the interaction between the defense budget and the health of the defense industry through analysis of contracting and financial tools.

This session, part of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research's summer workshop, focuses on the curriculum development of content-based thematic units. The presenter will introduce a framework for developing curricula and guides the participants through the process of designing content-based thematic units. Participants will engage in hands-on demonstration lessons and explore a variety of content-based instructional strategies to promote students' skills in interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational communication. Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have developed their own units to enhance their curricula.

The prevailing media credo, in domains that matter both a lot (popular, capitalist, and state discourse and action) and a little (communication, cultural, and media studies), is upheaval. The litany goes something like this: Corporate power is challenged. State authority is compromised. Avant-garde art and politics are centered. The young are masters, not victims. Technologies represent freedom, not domination. Revolutions are fomented by Twitter, not theory; by memes, not memos; by Facebook, not Foucault; by phone, not protest.

Political participation is just a click away. Tweets are the new streets and online friends the new vanguard, as 140ism displaces Maoism. Cadres are created and destroyed via BlackBerry. Teens tease technocrats. Hackers undermine hierarchy. Leakers dowse the fire of spies and illuminate the shady world of diplomats.

The endless iterations offered by digital reproduction and the immediate exchanges promised by the Internet have turned the world on its head. We are advised that the media in particular are being transformed. Tradition is rent asunder. Newspapers are metaphorically tossed aside. What was once their fate in a literal sense (when we dispensed with print in poubelles) is now a figure of speech that refers to their financial decline. Journalists are recycled as public relations people, and readers become the new journalists. Cinema is irrelevant, TV is on the way out, gaming is the future, telephony is timeless, and the entire panoply of scholarship on the political economy of ownership and control is of archaeological interest at best.

Is this really the case, and what are the conditions of possibility for claiming that it is or is not? Only global media studies knows...

Dr. Toby Miller is a British-Australian-U.S. interdisciplinary social scientist. He is the author and editor of over 30 books, has published essays in more than 100 journals and edited collections, and is a frequent guest commentator on television and radio programs. His research covers the media, sports, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy, as well as the success of Hollywood overseas and the adverse effects of electronic waste.

If there were a Himalayan range of world literature authors, then Franz Kafka would certainly be one of the peaks. And as is always the case with world literature, a tension exists between local, contextual readings of a Czech Jew who wrote in German, and a work in translation that seems to address the human condition in general. What happens to the humor of Kafka in this process of worlding and how can we describe its continued existence in translation in, for example American literature and popular culture? My dissertation analyzes the humor of Franz Kafka’s works, beginning with his early experiences with the Yiddish Theater and leading up to the current reception of his work in the United States by linking Kafka to the American television series Seinfeld and exploring how Kafka has been appropriated into American culture. This talk will focus on my findings at the German Literary Archives in Marbach, Germany which includes the early reception of Kafka, by means of the reviews and criticism published during his lifetime and those published shortly after his death in 1924.

Lauren Brooks is a fourth-year PhD candidate in German Literature and Culture at the Pennsylvania State University. Before coming to Penn State she spent six years in Bremen, Germany, where she taught English to business professionals. After returning to the United States, she completed her MA degree in German Studies at California State University Long Beach in 2012. Her dissertation focuses on Franz Kafka and Humor. Other areas of interest include foreign language pedagogy, Kleist, Schiller, and the German novella as well as Brecht, modern German drama, theater, and film. She is also the creator and organizer of the annual Poetry Without Borders event. She is currently working as a Graduate Instructional Consultant in the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Faced with world-wide crises today, the value system based on liberalism has proven to be inadequate on a global scale. There has appeared an urgent need to approach the global predicaments from the perspective of common ethics. In 1993, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions issued a Declaration: “Toward a Global Ethic,” signed by more than 200 leaders from over 40 different faith traditions and spiritual communities. It unequivocally declares: “No new global order without a new global ethic!” This truism lead us to ask: in the construction of a new world order, what moral principle or categorical imperative in Kantian terms can we find in ethical systems of the world which may serve as the spirit of a new world order? This article argues that the Confucian way of tolerance is perhaps a suitable choice because tolerance is now acknowledged as one of the spiritual achievements of modern times and may hold the ethical key to regulating human differences and resolving conflicts involving class, race, religion, nation and culture. The idea of tolerance is found in all cultural and spiritual traditions, but it is in Confucianism that it was elevated to a moral virtue, a way of life, an ethical theory, and to the exalted status of Tao (恕道) two millennia ago and has remained so since. This article will compare the ideas of tolerance in various traditions, examine the extent to which the Confucian way of tolerance transcends the limitations of regional religions and spiritual faiths, and explore how it may be modernized into the cornerstone of a universal ethics underlying the inner spirit of a new world order.

Informational session and Q&A on the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship Program which provides opportunities to doctoral candidates to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies. The program is designed to deepen research knowledge and increase the study of modern foreign languages, cultural engagement and area studies not generally included in U.S. curricula. Visit http://cgs.la.psu.edu/funding/fulbright-hays-doctoral-dissertation-research-abroad-program-award for more information.

Evans J.R. Revere will speak about current policy challenges in North Korea as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs' spring colloquium (INTAF 590). Revere is senior director with the Albright Stonebridge Group, providing strategic advice to clients with a specific focus on Korea, China and Japan. Fluent in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, Revere retired from the Foreign Service in 2007 after a distinguished career as one of the U.S. Department of State's top Asia experts. He has extensive experience in negotiations with North Korea.

This presentation combines insights from Lacan’s 1961-1962 seminar on anxiety with recent (feminist, queer, and affect theoretical) accounts of neoliberalism to analyze the contemporary Western phenomenon of pervasive anxiety. In his commentary on anxiety, Lacan repeatedly (and humorously) refers to the straight male subject’s sexual anxiety in the face of his female partner’s seemingly infinite capacity for jouissance: the fact that the phallus always falls short of the phallocentric ideal, faltering at the very moment of delivery. Keeping in mind that for Lacan the phallus is ultimately a signifier without a real-life referent––so that women can also aspire to phallic mastery -- Lacan’s depiction of “premature detumenescence” seems like an apt metaphor for the predicament of the neoliberal subject whose hunger for self-actualization, accomplishment, and satisfaction (the good life) tends to exceed its capacities, with the result that anxiety is, for many, the status quo of everyday life in today’s society. What are the cultural forces that produce this predicament? Why is it so difficult to get out of? Are there any antidotes to it? And might anxiety even have something to offer even as it derails our quest for a balanced life?

Mari Ruti is professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto. She is the author of ten books, most recently Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (Bloomsbury Press, 2015) and The Ethics of Opting Out: Defiance and Affect in Queer Theory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2016).

The Center for Global Studies at Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh’s Global Studies Center and the will host the event. The symposium will include a keynote lecture, student presentations and student networking.

The symposium will highlight student research on the complex array of social forces that characterize our increasingly interconnected world and will provide networking for students and faculty who are shaping how we approach these important topics and/or will provide leadership in the study of global issues in the future.

We encourage a wide variety of research topics on diverse areas including (but not limited to) the economy, gender, health, education, politics, media, nationalism, ethnicity, spirituality, and community. We invite papers from various disciplines within humanities, sciences, social sciences and professional schools that address the theme of interconnectedness. Submissions that employ diverse theories, genres, and methodologies of research in a plurality of historical and geographical contexts are encouraged. For more information, visit http://cgs.la.psu.edu/events/2016-global-studies-undergraduate-research-symposium.

Arnab Chakrabarty is an outstanding exponent of Hindustani classical music, and is arguably among the top handful of currently active sarode players. A relentlessly self-improving student of music, a teacher of extraordinary ability, an instrument designer and restorer of considerable skill, Arnab Chakrabarty is the complete sarode musician of his generation. Student tickets $4.00, General Admission $4.99.For more information about Arnab Chakrabarty, visitwww.arnabchakrabarty.com.

Sanju Sahai (also known as Vishnu Sahai) , is currently one of the finest and most sought after Tabla players of his generation. Belonging to the Benares Gharana (lineage) and being the 6th generation of Tabla players in the lineage, he began playing at an early age. Being a child prodigy, he gave his first Tabla solo performance at a major festival in Benares at the tender age of 9. He gained his Bachelor of Music at the age of 13 and Master of Music at 18 years of age. More information at www.sanjusahai.com.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Van Buren is a retired 24-year veteran of the U.S. Department of State. He spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, was published in 2011, and his latest book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, has just been published.

A slim uneducated guy is pressured into an arranged marriage with an overweight college girl. The mismatched couple are challenged to compete in the annual wife-carrying race. This screening is part of the CGS South Asian Film Series.

Visiting Professor of Gender and Critical Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Professor of Critical Philosophy at The Global Center for Advanced Studies, Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff engages embodied feminist theory, and has published essays in philosophy, art, gender, and ethnic studies' journals and anthologies. Summa cum laude, she earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from The European Graduate School. Alhadeff's first transdisciplinary book, Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014), explores the vulnerability of the body as a strategy for social justice. Her new book, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, addresses eco-literacy and the diaspora of Jews-of-Color. Alhadeff's work has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television, and has been publicly defended by Freedom of Speech organizations such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the American Way, and the ACLU. Her photographs are in numerous collections including SFMoMA, The Jewish Museum in Berlin, MoMA Salzburg and The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

This talk attempts to understand what “the contemporary” has meant to the novel, and in turn should mean, for comparative studies of the novel. Sauri takes the contemporary Latin American novel as a test case, and argue for reading it in relation recent transformations in the political configuration of the world-system. What happens to the novel, when the conditions of possibility for social and economic modernization within the formerly developing world have been radically altered—if not altogether eliminated—by a deepening crisis in the world economic system? This is an historical shift, which, beginning in the 1970s, would eventually give rise to what the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes describes as “o novo tempo do mundo,” or “new world time,” in which “the very modern notion of progress—and the temporality of history that made it thinkable” is neutralized. Sauri holds that in reading recent works by authors like César Aira, Pola Oloixarac, Nicolás Cabral, and Roberto Bolaño, we can see that how this “novo tempo do mundo” has altered the Latin American novel’s sense of the present to reflect something like a development without developmentalism on the level of narrative. Viewed from this perspective, the question of the contemporary not only calls for a modification of comparative approaches to the study of the novel—as exemplified by Casanova, as well as critics like Fredric Jameson, Roberto Schwarz, and Franco Moretti—but also raises new questions about the political horizon of literature today.

Emilio Sauri is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and visual art from the U.S. and Latin America, and reads these in relation to the development of the world-system.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Karl Hofman, Christina Fitz, and Annie Davies, Population Services International

Retired U.S. ambassador and SIA advisory board member Karl Hofmann will present “Demography, fertility, sustainability – How global population trends shape your future" as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs' spring colloquium (INTAF 590).

Hofmann is President and Chief Executive Officer of Population Services International, a Washington-based global health organization. Mr. Hofmann is former U.S. Ambassador to Togo and Executive Secretary of the State Department. He also served on President Clinton's National Security Council staff.

While accelerated technological innovation, intensified global competition, and macroeconomic volatility continue to act as powerful drivers for the changing nature of work, many countries are experiencing a deepening segmentation between workers with stable employment relationships and those with temporary work contracts. In the recent report of Global Employment Trends, the International Labor Organization underscores that the unprecedented growth in contingent work constitutes a worldwide challenge for economic recovery and social development. This study draws on both quantitative and qualitative data to examine the rise of contingent work in China. Results indicate that in the presence of weak labor institutions and poor enforcement, Chinese companies adopt contingent employment practices to retain the power to terminate employees at will, accrue benefits through regulatory arbitrage, and promote their own interests when handling conflicting intra-organizational demands. Xiangmin (Helen) Liu is an Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management in the School of Labor and Employment Relations. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Asian Studies. Dr. Liu received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Human Resource Studies from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. Her research focuses on strategic human resource management, contingent work, and employment relations in Asian countries such as China and Vietnam.

This talk will focus on continuity of Soviet conspiratorial ideas and narratives in post- Soviet Russia. What ‘performative shifts’ of late Soviet discourse were adopted and transformed by ‘communities of loss’ in the 1990s and 2000s? Why did conservative nationalism of the 1970s become so significant for Russian popular culture forty years later? What messages are encoded by the symbolic language of moral panics and conspiracy theories related to the ‘imaginary West’ in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society? These questions can be at least partly answered by an analysis of the so called Dulles Plan for Russia, a conspiratorial forgery based on borrowings from the novel Vechnyi Zov (the Eternal Call, 1971–76) by the Soviet writer Anatoliy Ivanov. The talk deals with its history, ideological contexts and popular reception in present day Russia.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Yapa Lakshman, professor in the Penn State Geography Department at the College of Earth and Mineral Science, will present on policy challenges in Policy as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs’ spring colloquium: Current Policy Challenges.

Lakshman’s current research project, Rethinking Urban Poverty in the United States, is an academic program that combines teaching, research, and service learning in West Philadelphia. He moves away from conventional economic and welfare approaches of poverty by defining it as a substantive question related to access—to transport, housing, nutrition, health-care, and so on. Lakshman’s research combines theories of economic development, postmodern discourse theory, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Despite the massive efforts at economic development, statistical evidence shows a troubling persistence of poverty and increasing inequality of income (both within and between nations). Reminiscent of a Kuhnian "crisis in the paradigm", development economists (and their principal Marxist critics) are not able to offer us a satisfactory explanation of the failure of development.

In this global economy having a global workforce is a competitive necessity. However this need comes at a very high cots, and for the company to get as much out of this investment as possible, they need to make sure they are managing this process the right way. In this presentation, Loredana Abreu, second-year graduate student from Penn State's School of Labor and Employment Relations, will explain where are companies going wrong with international assignments and how they can avoid to make these mistakes and prevent major economic losses.

Environmental change and disaster. The evolution and fate of the human race. Understanding the Other (gender, race, sexuality, class, belief, the alien). The ethics of technoscience. The possibility of space and/or time travel. Issues of extra- Terran colonization and colonialism. Future world wars. Dystopias and utopias. What/where is reality? What if X had happened, instead of Y? In many of its questions and critiques the genre of science fiction (SF) is, per force, global. Depending how you define SF and proto-SF, one can find beginning points with H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and even Dante and Lucian. As a designated literary genre, however, SF began in the US in the 1920s; and it was the US, followed quickly by England, and predominantly by white men in both countries, whose perspective quickly came to dominate the field. Elsewhere in the world, genre SF (literature, film, etc.) evolved at various moments from the mid-twentieth century on, at times in imitation of Anglophone SF, at times in conversation with it, and at times with a concerted effort to build a narrative set in and reflective of an author’s culture. Dr. Saiber's talk will address this tension between the apparently “global” nature of SF and the inevitably “local” characteristics implicit within its production. She will give an overview of the current state of “World Science Fiction” and then focus on one country’s production—a country few would ever associate with SF, and yet one with a significant output since the 1950s, and with notable local peculiarities: Italy."

Arielle Saber is Associate Professor of Italian, Bowdoin College (Ph.D., Italian Literature, Yale, 1999). She has published articles on medieval and early modern Italian literature; early modern mathematics, print history, and advice manuals; literature & science studies; genre theory and experimental electronic music; and Dante in contemporary culture.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Dr. Mark Reese is Central Asian Subject Matter Expert with nineteen years of experience in region. Eight years regional field work in activities ranging from program management, academic research, to combat mission support. Current areas of research focus include social, political and cultural issues in present day Central and South Asia as well as translation of Uzbek literature into English.

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed an upsurge and a flourishing of time travel fiction in China, which is physically, logically, and/or humanly impossible. The boom of this new narrative genre has been fueled in no small part by the so-called “postmodernist turn” coupled with the “historiographical turn”, to the degree that it is no longer possible to read it along the lines of traditional narrative theory. With contemporary Chinese time travel fiction as its central concern, this article pursues four major goals: 1) to uncover its dominant unnatural patterns and means of time travel, 2) to reveal its unnaturalness from such perspectives as metalepsis, prolepsis, self-contradictory narration, and multiperson narration, 3) to examine its consequences and values of being unnatural, and 4) to offer a way of naturalizing it by suggesting the intersection of unnatural narratology with ethical narratology.

Biwu Shang is a Distinguished Research Fellow of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, editor of Frontiers of Narrative Studies. His areas of research include narrative theory, ethical literary criticism, and contemporary Anglo-American fiction. He is the author of two critical monographs (In Pursuit of Narrative Dynamics, 2011; Contemporary Western Narratology: Postclassical Perspectives, 2013). His writings were published or are forthcoming in such journals as Style, Journal of Literary Semantics, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Semiotica, Neohelicon, Primerjalna Književnost, and Arcadia: International Journal of Literary Studies.

Leif Trana, Minister Counsellor for Economic Affairs at the Embassy of Norway will present "Managing the Global Commons: Norway's Interests in the Arctic" as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs’ spring colloquium. The Arctic is Norway’s top policy issue.

Before joining the Embassy of Norway in August 2014, Trana serviced as the director of the section for organizational development in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Oslo. In this position, he focused on how to align the resources used at various embassies with Norwegian interests in the corresponding country or organization. Before that, he was deputy director int eh same section. He spent five years working on World Trade Organization matters focusing on the agricultural and the National Agri-Marketing Association negotiations in the Doha Development Agenda. Trana is a career foreign-service officer who has served in Riyadh and Washington. He received his M.A. in economics from the University of Oslo.

In 1618, Li Zhizao (js.1598, d.1630), a prominent Christian converted in early 17th century, published Pangong Li Yue Shu (PGLYS), a manual for worshiping Confucius in the local Confucius Temple. The text raises an interesting question, “Why did a prominent Chinese Christian worship Confucius and even encourage others to do the same?” I argue that Li’s production of the text had a specific and precise intention, in view of the fact that it was published in 1618, one year after the Nanjing Persecution (1616-1617), the first attempt by the Ming court to proscribe Christianity in China. By publishing PGLYS, Li endeavored to allay the doubts and suspicions on the part of the Confucian elites about Christianity, especially the accusation that Christianity sought to dislodge and replace Confucianism. Through the perspective of a prominent Chinese convert, Tang hopes to shed some light on the question of the religiosity and religiousness of Confucianism. Kwok-leong Tang is a Ph.D. student of history at the Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation “Cultural Unity and Political Legitimacy in Local and Transnational Contexts: The Temple of Culture (wenmiao) in Late Imperial China and Vietnam” explores the questions of cultural unity and political legitimacy in the late imperial period by pursuing an in-depth study of the Temple of Culture in China, and to a lesser extent, Vietnam.

The third millennium dawned for Polish modernist Bruno Schulz (1898-1942) with a remarkable instance of scission and damaged contiguity. Almost certainly his last creative works, nursery murals that Schulz had painted for a Gestapo officer’s villa were discovered and then spirited out of Drohobycz in several fragments. Transported to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem with a portion left in situ in Ukraine, they now endure an uncannily ruptured afterlife in unintended echo of what Schulz celebrated mythopoeically as 'the migration of forms.' That this fate also echoes a series of transpositions and appropriations undergone by the biographical figure of Schulz himself across the border of the late 20th and early 21st century prose fiction makes the episode especially uncanny. In this talk, we will consider an unlikely epilogue of artist/artifact transit across the boundaries of nation, language, and cultural heritage.

Dr. Adam Zachary Newton is University Professor and Ronald P. Stanton Chair in Literature and the Humanities at Yeshiva University and former chair of the Yeshiva College English department. He did his graduate work in literature and philosophy at Harvard University, and in addition to his many articles, essays, and plenary talks, has published five books under the general rubric of the ethics of reading in the areas of Narrative Theory, American Studies, Modern Jewish Thought, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies. He is now at work on a sixth monograph on the subject of Jewish Studies and the academic Humanities.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Dr. Jayakar serves as co-director of the Institute for Information Policy, housed in the College of Communications. His areas of research cover telecommunications policy and media economics, with a special interest in universal access to telecommunications. He is a past head of the Media Management and Economics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and currently serves on the boards of editors of The Information Society journal and the Journal of Information Policy. His research has been supported by grants from the Pacific Telecommunications Foundation, the Time Warner Cable Research Program on Digital Communications, the Media Democracy Fund, and AT&T.

In 2013, he received the Deans' Award for Excellence in Integrated Scholarship. He had previously received the 2004 Deans’ Award for Excellence in Integrated Scholarship and the 2002 Deans’ Award for Excellence in Teaching. Before joining academia, Dr. Jayakar was a research officer in India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, drafting research reports and position papers on media policy.

Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard (1750-1825) was the wife of a colonial administrator at the Cape of Good Hope, 1797-1802, under the governorship of Sir George Macartney and Sir George Yonge. The object of merely sentimental interest till the 1990s, critical attention to her letters, diaries and watercolours reveals the engagement of a subtle, sceptical, and creative mind whose work and wit offer remarkable insights into life in the colony – standing at the crossroads of East and West at a crucial historical moment – and that raise questions about the relations between history, fiction and politics that continue to be relevant today.

Greg Clingham is the John P. Crozer Chair of English Literature and the Director of the University Press at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on literature 1650-1850, and on a wide range of texts in their relations with law, history, East-West relations, the exotic, memory, translation, and landscape. He is the author of Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge, 2002) and also of many other books and essays on Johnson, Boswell, Dryden, and issues in historiography and translation.

Roger Finke is a Penn State professor of sociology and religious studies in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. He is also the Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives and is the President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Professor Finke co-authored two influential books with sociologist of religion Rodney Stark. The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy received the 1993 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion received the 2001 Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion Section. These books extended what is often called the New Paradigm or the Rational Choice theoretical perspective, conceptualizing denominations as competitors in a religious market. The Churching of America was methodologically noteworthy for demonstrating the utility of quantitative historical data on church membership. Additionally, Finke is the co-author of The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century and Places of Faith: A Road Trip Across America's Religious Landscape. He is author or co-author of numerous peer-reviewed articles appearing in edited volumes and journals such as American Sociological Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Review of Religious Research, Social Science Research, and The Sociological Quarterly.

Professor Finke was the founding director of the American Religion Data Archive, which was renamed as the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) in 2005. Supported by the Lilly Endowment and the John Templeton Foundation, the ARDA is a diverse, freely-available online digital library offering American and international data files, along with tools and resources to assist educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers. Finke is also a Fellow of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion and a past President of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture.

As geographical borders diminish in importance and markets globalize, English is rapidly becoming a preferred language of discourse. In this talk, I present collaborative work (resulting from international collaboration with Mirjam Ernestus at Radboud University and funding by the National Science Foundation to the Center for Language Science) that explores those situations where both interlocutors are non-native speakers using English as a lingua franca. In order to investigate the flexibility of phonological categories in bilingual language production, recordings of Spanish-English bilinguals in Spain speaking with two Dutch-English bilingual confederates across two speech styles (the Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English) were used to track the production patterns of two key vowel contrasts in English. The first, the difference between bit and beet, is not present in Spanish but is present in Dutch; the second, the difference between bat and bet, is not present in Dutch but is distinguished by Spanish speakers of English. Results of statistical analysis reveal that the Spaniards align their production patterns not to more native-like English (which would require a four-way contrast), but rather to the production patterns of their Dutch interlocutors. This is also a function of speech style and proficiency: Spaniards make the beet/bit distinction gradually over time in informal, but not formal speech, and more proficient speakers align more strongly than less proficient speakers to the merged bat/bet production of the Dutch speakers. These findings are interpreted in a framework where alignment to the patterns of one's interlocutor is a complex relationship among language-internal and language-external factors.

Grant Berry is a 2016-2017 Center for Global Studies Fellow. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish and Language Science in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and an active member of the Center for Language Science. While he maintains varied interests in phonetics, phonology, and bilingualism, the nexus of his research is language variation and change. Grant's research examines sociodemographic and cognitive behavioral factors that link an individual to his/her community on the level of his/her linguistic production, especially in situations where language is undergoing change or is highly stratified along socioeconomic and/or ethnic lines. More information can be found atgrantberry.info.

The networked nature of politics today has led to a divergence from postcolonial and ethnic studies rubrics towards horizontalist approaches to cultural criticism like the Global South. This talk details the cultural history of this horizontal turn through tracing the roots of the contemporary notion of the Global South to the ideology of a profoundly influential but largely elided cold war movement called the Tricontinental. Mahler argues that this ideology, which was disseminated among the international Left through the Tricontinental’s expansive cultural production, revised a black Atlantic resistant subjectivity into a global vision of subaltern resistance that is resurfacing today.

Dr. Anne Garland Mahler is an assistant professor of Latin American cultural studies at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include global south studies, black internationalism, and cold war politics, and her book manuscript is entitled The Color of Resistance: Race and Solidarity from the Tricontinental to the Global South. Her second project, Men with Guns: Cultures of Paramilitarism in the Modern Americas, was awarded a 2015 Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant. Mahler’s articles have appeared in Latin American Research Review; Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism; Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; and U.S. Latino(a) Studies.

This workshop is designed to bring together K-12 teachers, administrators, and university scholars who share a passion in teaching that environmental sustainability, renewable energy and innovation are fundamental goals for our collective futures.

Kruczek graduated from Penn State in 2005 with a B.A. in Political Science and B.S. in Professional Golf Management. During time as an undergraduate, spent time in Cairo, Egypt and Beirut, Lebanon studying Arabic and each state's political culture. In Fall 2006 completed intensive Arabic program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, CA. Worked as Research Assistant at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies (Arlington, VA) from 2006-2007. In 2007 served as Information Officer at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. After a brief stint in Beirut in late-2007, returned to Penn State for his Masters, graduating from the School of International Affairs in 2009. Master's paper dealt with confessional politics in Lebanon. From 2010-2012 was a lead researcher in Penn State's College of Information Science and Technology on the counter-insurgency component of a Multi-University Research Initiative sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Lab. In 2011 joined the faculty of Susquehanna University as an instructor in the Department of Political Science, teaching classes on world politics and comparative domestic politics. In January 2013 began pursuing Ph.D in Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech's Washington, D.C. campus under the guidance of Dr. Ariel Ahram. His dissertation topic concerns the Christian response to the Arab Spring.

Career Services is partnering with the University Office of Global Programs and the Center for Global Studies to host an employer panel for domestic and international students looking to work abroad and in the United States after graduation. Panelists representing an array of business sectors will provide information on topics including various opportunities for employment, career development strategies and tips, and the increasing necessity to build global awareness to be competitive in today’s employment market. Small networking round table discussions will follow the panel presentation.

This lecture will examine the revolutionary aesthetics and politics of the late-nineteenth-century Puerto Rican intellectual Ramón Emeterio Betances. An under examined figure in Caribbean history, Betances stood out among the contemporary Hispanic Caribbean elite for his singular experiences of dislocation: he lived most of his life in France; he included Haiti within his vision of a Caribbean federation; and he was of African descent. Focusing on his early romantic novella The Two Indians (1853) and his texts on Haiti, we will ask how Betances’s resignification of indigeneity and patriotism offer alternate routes to understanding the emergence of nationalist traditions in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh through the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He specializes in Caribbean and Latin American modern and contemporary literatures and culture, recently co-edited a special issue of Discourse journal dedicated to Édouard Glissant, and is currently working on a book project about creole intellectuals, anti-colonial politics, and visions of colonial crisis in nineteenth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Khanjan Mehta, the Founding Director of the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) Program and Assistant Professor of Engineering Design at Penn State, will speak on "Appropriate Technologies in the Globalized World" as part of the Penn State School of International Affairs’ spring colloquium: Current Policy Challenges.

Mehta’s research interests encompass affordable design; systems thinking; social entrepreneurship pedagogy; agricultural technologies and food value chains (FVCs); global health and telemedicine systems; cellphones, social networks and trust; indigenous knowledge systems; development ethics and grassroots diplomacy; women in engineering and entrepreneurship; and informal lending systems for micro-enterprises. The objective of these research endeavors is to democratize knowledge and mainstream HESE as a valid and rigorous area of learning, research, and engagement. He has published over 65 journal articles and refereed conference proceedings with a similar number in the pipeline. Mehta serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine and Contributing Editor for the Engineering 4 Change portal.

Filmed over 211 shooting days in nine countries and five continents, the film shows viewers how communities across the globe are tackling the challenge of climate change. From Montana's Powder River basin and the Alberta Tar Sands to the streets of Beijing and Greece, activists, scientists, and author Naomi Klein challenge us to re-imagine and reinvent the economic system that has brought about disruptive climate change. Following each screening, Penn State faculty from atmospheric sciences, communications, and more will participate in a panel discussion with questions taken from the audience.

Filmed over 211 shooting days in nine countries and five continents, the film shows viewers how communities across the globe are tackling the challenge of climate change. From Montana's Powder River basin and the Alberta Tar Sands to the streets of Beijing and Greece, activists, scientists, and author Naomi Klein challenge us to re-imagine and reinvent the economic system that has brought about disruptive climate change. Following each screening, Penn State faculty from atmospheric sciences, communications, and more will participate in a panel discussion with questions taken from the audience.

A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system connects a young housewife to an older man in the dusk of his life as they build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. This screening was part of the CGS South Asian Film Series.

Lydia Edwards is a new kind of labor leader for a changing labor movement: an architect of the Massachusetts Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation; coordinator of grassroots efforts to implement the law with domestic workers, employers, labor, state agencies and academic institutions; advocate for labor trafficked domestic workers, who are disproportionately immigrant women of color; 2015 Bostonian of the Year.

The last decade has witnessed ongoing debates about the implementation of Emergency law in response to insurgency and terrorism. A question world powers confront post 9/11 is, “what is the temporality of Emergency; what justifies its extension through time?” Colonial novels of Jamaica demonstrate that this question has a history and a literary history. In their formal stagings of the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 and the brutal counter-insurgency that ensued, forgotten works by Herbert George de Lisser and Victor Stafford Reid alternately elaborate and challenge a rhetoric of “necessity” that governs arguments for the temporal extension of Emergency law during the colonial era, a rhetoric that has returned anew today.

Nicole Rizzuto is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is author of Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature (Fordham University Press, December 2015). Her work appears in Comparative Literature, College Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, World Picture, and Contemporary Literature.

Experience stories, songs and art in different languages. Fun for speakers of all languages, including English. World Stories Alive! is a collaborative project brought to you by Schlow Centre Region Library and The Center for Global Studies at Penn State.

Lawrence Wilkerson's last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02). Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a member of the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (1987 to 1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel, and began work as an advisor to General Powell. He has also taught national security affairs in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. He is currently working on a book about the first George W. Bush administration.

This paper argues for a biopolitical approach to Walt Whitman’s poetry, one that considers how Whitman locates utopian possibility in a poetics of the flesh. I examine two adaptations of Whitman’s poetry, a 2009 Levi’s Jeans commercial directed by Cary Fukunaga and Rob Halpern’s 2012 collection of poetry Music for Porn. The former stages Whitman’s utopian aspirations in post-Katrina New Orleans, the latter revises Whitman’s Civil War poetry in response to the second Gulf War. In both cases, the historical wounds borne by bodies become sites for reimagining social futures. Whitman’s name, I propose, becomes a crossroads in which the long disaster of American exceptionalism converges with struggles to construct a world beyond the constraints of capitalist and state formations.

Christian Haines is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is completing his first book, A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons, which examines utopian figurations of corporeality in nineteenth-century and contemporary U.S. literature. He has published essays in journals including Criticism, Genre, and Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. He is co-editor and a contributor to a forthcoming special issue of Cultural Critique entitled “What Comes After the Subject?” His current research examines the relationship between contemporary cultural production and finance capital.

Dr. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor in the Penn State Department of Geosciences at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, will speak about climate change as the first speaker of the Penn State School of International Affairs’ spring colloquium.

Alley has authored more than 170 refereed scientific publications about the relationships between Earth's cryosphere and global climate change. Alley testified about climate change before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology in 2007 and 2010. His 2007 testimony was due to his role as a lead author of "Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground" for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has participated in the joint United Nations World Meteorological Organization panel since 1992, having been a contributing author to both the second and third IPCC assessment reports.

Interested in working for the government? Join us for this presentation to learn more about the types of career paths the government offers at the federal, state, and local level. Gain a better understanding of the resources available to Penn State Students in order to better quantify your search for an internship or full time job in this sector of employment.

Gai Nyok, one of the former “Lost Boys” of Sudan, will speak at Penn State. Recently inducted into the U.S. Department of State as a foreign service officer, Nyok was one of more than 25,000 children orphaned by his country’s civil war and fled his village when he was 5 years old. He will share his experiences as a refugee and the story of his journey and new life in America.

Have you studied or worked abroad? Learn what employers look for in potential candidates with these invaluable international experiences. This presentation will allow you to gain a better understanding of how to market your time abroad effectively to employers by reflecting and connecting your experiences to the current job market.

Dr. Piazza is Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on terrorism and political violence. Specific interests include: socioeconomic roots of terrorism; regime-type, human rights, repression and terrorism; state failure and terrorism; religion, ideology and terrorist organizations and behavior; ethnic minorities and terrorism; the global narcotics trade and terrorism; natural resources and conflict; right-wing extremism in the United States; public opinion and counterterrorism. His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Public Choice, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Political Research Quarterly, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Interactions, Defence and Peace Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Security Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.

Bringing together Marxist considerations of political economy with the critical discourse of biopolitics, this lecture considers the power of financial abstractions to foster life or to disallow life to the point of death.

Christian Haines is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He is currently completing a book entitled A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons, which examines utopian figurations of biology and corporeality in nineteenth-century and contemporary U.S. literature. He is also working on a project on global finance and the politics of abstraction with the working title Finance as a Way of Life.

The Center for Global Studies is pleased to announce the competition for FLAS Fellowships for the Pennsylvania State University. FLAS Fellowships are authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act and are administered by the U.S. Department of Education. They assist undergraduate and graduate students in achieving competency in selected foreign languages and conducting research in related international and area studies. Learn more about this exciting opportunity by coming to our informational session and by visiting our FLAS page. Students from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

The film examines the plight of a group of widows forced into poverty at a temple in the holy city of Varanasi. It focuses on a relationship between one of the widows, who wants to escape the social restrictions imposed on widows, and a man who is from the highest caste and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi.

The Egyptian Revolution has been an ongoing roller coaster over the past two and a half years. Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of July 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. The Square is an immersive experience, transporting the viewer deeply into the intense emotional drama and personal stories behind the news. It is the inspirational story of young people claiming their rights, struggling through multiple forces, in the fight to create a society of conscience.

The Center for Global Studies is pleased to announce the competition for FLAS Fellowships for the Pennsylvania State University. FLAS Fellowships are authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act and are administered by the U.S. Department of Education. They assist undergraduate and graduate students in achieving competency in selected foreign languages and conducting research in related international and area studies. Learn more about this exciting opportunity by coming to our informational session and by visiting our FLAS page. Students from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

An intimate look into the lives of nine young Chinese, coming of age in a society that is changing a breathtaking speed. A riveting and poignant journey, Young & Restless in China tracks the lives of nine ambitious young Chinese men and women struggling to make it in this very tumultuous and rapidly changing society. Whether defying Eastern cultural traditions in pursuit of more Western values, struggling through (often erratic) government protocols to start a new business, or fighting to preserve the environment, this new generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings is caught between the bonds of their nation’s history and their own quest for a very different future. Narrated by ER star Ming Wen, Young & Restless in China captures the coming-of-age of China’s most dynamic generation in ways as intimately familiar as they are decidedly new.

Dr. David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture and a Reader in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Westminster in London. He has published widely on aesthetics, modernism, and the theory of the novel, including collections on Adorno and Literature and Photography and Literature. He is a longstanding editor of the journal Radical Philosophy.

We're mobilizing for social justice. On November 19, hundreds of Penn Staters from environmental and social justice groups will unite at Old Main to call for an end to injustices caused by climate change and environmental degradation. Nobel Prize co-recipient Michael Mann will be speaking. This event is co-sponsored by a diverse, inclusive coalition of progressive groups: Sustainability Institute, Center for Global Studies, Green Party of Pennsylvania, Fossil Free PSU, NAACP at Penn State, Penn State Student Black Caucus, Eco-Action, Student Society for Indigenous Knowledge, Latino Caucus, I.D.E.A.S., Students for Sanders, WORDS, College Democrats, United Students Against Sweatshops, Dominican Student Association, Asian/Pacific-American Caucus, P.O.W.E.R., Human Rights Brigades, Global Water Brigades, Public Health Brigades, Environmental Brigades, Student Works at Penn States, Degrees Not Debt, Engineers for a Sustainable World, Political Science Association, Penn State Green Party, Penn State Hillel, 3rd Way Collective, Westminster Presbyterian Fellowship, Women in Politics, Houseasaurus Co-Op, Sierra Club Moshannon Group.

Career Services will be presenting information on the tips for the job and internship search for international students on November 19th. During this presentation, students will gain insight into the process of applying for jobs and internships, what employers look for in successful candidates, as well as how to become more self-aware about values and skills in order to identify employers and market themselves effectively.

In conjunction with the Office of Global Programs and the Center for Global Studies, Penn State Career Services will be hosting a presentation for international students regarding obtainment of work visas after graduation. The presentation will be given by Mark Rhoads, an experienced immigration attorney. Mr. Rhoads will provide practical information regarding the most common work visas available that allow Penn State students to stay and work within the United States after graduation. There will be a focus on Optional Practical Training (OPT) and the H1B. Mr. Rhoads will provide strategies for dealing with the H1B quota and filing deadlines, as well as strategies for discussing “visa status” questions with employers during your job search. He will also discuss alternatives to the H1B for those who qualify, including L-1, E visas, and others.

Dr. Lee Ann De Reus is an Associate Professor of Human Development & Family Studies and Women Studies at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona and the co-founder/assistant executive director of Panzi Foundation USA (www.panzifoundation.org). As a scholar-activist, she travels regularly to Panzi Hospital in eastern DR Congo to conduct research, develop programs for rape survivors, and inform her advocacy work in the U.S. She co-leads annual field experiences for PSU students to Rwanda and Mozambique and co-founded Beza Kids (www.bezakids.org) in support of vulnerable women and children there. Dr. De Reus is a 2009 Carl Wilkens Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards from Penn State University in recognition of exemplary teaching and in honor of her commitment to global service and outreach.

Career Services has partnered with the Office of Global Programs and the Center for Global Studies to host an employer panel for domestic and international students looking to work abroad, as well as within the United States, after graduation. Panelists from different sectors of companies and organizations will provide information on topics including awareness of an increasingly global world of careers, alternative opportunities of employment, and career development strategies and tips.

R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the boundary 2 Editorial Collective. He is author of (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992), and has published numerous essays in the areas of contemporary Islamic philosophy, literary/cultural theory, music, Arabic and world literatures, including “Some Thoughts on Naguib Mahfouz in the Spirit of Secular Criticism,” and “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al- waqi‘i, or New Realist Science.” Having studied Arabic language and literature at al-Azhar University from 1975-79 and the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes, Université de Tunis I in 1988, he was subsequently a Fulbright Fellow at the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes from 1998-99, and has edited two important boundary 2 dossiers on Tunisia: The Tunisian Revolution Dignity (2012), and Some Notes on the Status of Global English in Tunisia (2000). This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

Drs. Sun Ping and Sun Yuhua will also speak on issues of Chinese constitutional law in the current climate. Dr. Sun Ping is a professor of law at Eastern China University of Political Science & Law, specializing in Chinese human rights and constitutional issues. Dr. Sun Yuhua is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University Law School, specializing in Chinese constitutional law. Dr. Sun Ping and Dr. Sun Yuhua will present, “China and its Constitutional Order.” An informal Q & A discussion will take place following the presentation to address questions on the presentation and general issues related to Chinese law (1.5 hours of lecture followed by 1 hour of discussion).

Nationalism has always been a contradictory and problematic issue for progressive politics, provoking an inconsistency at the level of political theory that is matched only by the often chaotic reality of political practice. This lecture will argue that the contemporaneous emergence of ‘bourgeois’ nationalism and a world market in the second part of the nineteenth century was far from coincidental and, moreover, that this overlooked and misunderstood convergence provides a model for contemporary responses to globalization. Contrary to the twin assumptions that transnational political problems necessarily require transnational solutions and that the nation State is becoming increasingly irrelevant, civic nationalism has never been more important as a basis for political organization. Contemporary Scotland is offered as an exemplary case, demonstrating how a politics driven by the apparently limited terms of ‘national self-determination’ might become a model for broader political resistance to the assumptions of our precarious ‘New World Order’.

Alastair Renfrew is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Durham University. His main area of research specialization is literary and critical theory, particularly Mikhail Bakhtin and the so-called Russian Formalists; he has also taught and published on Russian and Soviet Cinema and on Russian and Scottish Literature. He is author of Towards a New Material Aesthetics (Legenda, 2006) and Mikhail Bakhtin (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of the collection Critical Theory in Russia and the West (Routledge, 2010); he is currently working on projects on Lenin and on Dialectics and Dialogics.

Poetry Without Borders is an annual, university-wide, student-run poetry reading forum where students and faculty expose the audience to different languages and cultures. The event aims to bring together people with different backgrounds and passions. In the past, we had contributions from languages such as German, Chinese, Mongolian, Kazakhs, Norwegian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Turkish, Hebrew, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, and Portuguese, and students and faculty from different majors and research fields. Attendees will be exposed to hearing different languages and will be positively impacted by this cultural diversity, sharing or finding an interest in foreign cultures and languages. Sponsored by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the School of Languages and Literatures, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for Global Studies, the Center for Language Science, the Woskob Family Endowment in Ukrainian Studies, and Penn State University Libraries.

Venezuela was cursed with the world’s largest oil reserves. The South American country suffers the world’s most expensive Big Mac and the highest homicide per capita. As the country slides ever closer to hyperinflation and crime rates continue to spin wildly, one thing remains clear: the price of the regime’s survival appears to be the slow death of all Venezuelans. Join us for a compelling talk on the future of Venezuela. Alfredo Malaret is a second-year graduate student from the School of International Affairs specializing on Development Policy and International Security Studies. Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, Malaret is strongly passionate for the eradication of economic disparity in this country. To reach his goals, he will be moving to Peru by the end of the year, where he will start his professional career working at the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Hsin-fang Wu is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of History at Penn State. She is currently working on her dissertation, the “Transmission of Memory in the Jesuit Mission in Shanghai, 1842-1949.” This dissertation will examine how the new Jesuit missionaries to China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries perceived and interpreted the history of the earlier Jesuit Chinese mission in the late Ming and early Qing periods, and how the new missionaries transmitted their re-interpretation of this legacy through their newly established publishing programs and related mission activities.

Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar. Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, her study of the outmoded city of lagoons as a crucible for twentieth-century aesthetic and political experiments, was published by Columbia University Press in 2014 and is a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association’s annual book award. She edited and translated Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, winner of the Academy of American Poets’s Raiziss/De Palchi Prize, and curated Belladonna Elders Series 5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse. Poetry collections include From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and Exit 43, an archaeology of landfill and opera of pop-up counterpastorals, forthcoming from Atelos Press. She is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Romance Languages and Literatures and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago.

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

The Circuits of Justice workshop will address issues of activism and public protest; organizing and resistance; gender, race, and intersectional analytics; work and labor; precarity; incarceration; urban (in)justice; environmental (in)justice; subalternism and recognition; emotion and affect; and informal, restorative and transitional justice. Anyone interested in research about in issues of justice, equity, human rights and human vulnerability is invited to attend the panel discussion.

This keynote is part of the "Circuits of Justice" workshop hosted by the Department of Geography and co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Rock Ethics Institute, Supporting Women in Geography, and the Center for Global Studies.

Non-governmental organization (NGO) field workers believe they are empowering Somali women through training with refugees and recent immigrants in Dadaab, Kenya and Toronto, Canada. Empowerment is a contested term, with some NGO educators presenting women’s empowerment as participation in existing social structures and more efficient performance of their traditional roles, while others argue empowerment is related to social transformation and change. Somali refugee women conceptualize their own empowerment as they balance (re)connecting and (re)structuring families and communities after displacement. This presentation discusses dissertation research to understand how empowerment is interpreted in NGO training with Somali women in Dadaab and Toronto and subsequently internalized, reappropriated, and/or contested by learners.

Allyson Krupar has over seven years’ experience in research, project development, monitoring and evaluation in local organizations worldwide, specifically focusing on projects related to education for professionals, post-secondary education, and education for older learners who have not completed traditional formal schooling. Ms. Krupar has worked on education and human rights programs in the US, conflict resolution training in Liberia, health education in Uganda, and technology and education worldwide. She has taught at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul and worked in distance and e-learning at Makerere University's Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda and American University. She recently worked as a Visiting Researcher with RET, an international organization focusing on post-primary education for displaced people, where she conducted impact evaluation of programming and independent research towards her dissertation. She also is an Adjunct Instructor with American University’s School for Professional and Extended Studies. Ms. Krupar holds a Bachelors of Arts in Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University and a Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies focusing on conflict resolution, human rights law and anthropology from the School of International Service at American University. Currently, she is a Doctoral Candidate in Adult Education and Comparative International Education at Penn State University.

This lecture is a part of the Center for Global Studies Brown Bag Graduate Lecture Series which focuses on interdisciplinary graduate research.

For Michel Foucault the subject, subjectivation, is one of the ways in which the event of discourse is regulated and controlled by means of limitations and exclusions – regulated not from outside it but as a procedure internal to discourse. It is in the service of a liberation from those limitations that Foucault urges us to discover, beneath the manifest themes of expression, of plenitude, a principle of “discontinuity.” Discourses, he says in “The Order of Discourse,” “must be treated as discontinuous practices, which cross each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other.” In the spirit of Foucault’s inquiry, I will take up the question of the subject of the work of fiction. Through a comparison of two recent uses of free indirect discourse, I will attempt to locate the question of the subject of the work of fiction at the site of the “caesurae” that, says Foucault, “break up the instant and disperse the subject into a plurality of possible positions and functions.”

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

Sun Come Up is an Academy Award® nominated film that shows the human face of climate change. The film follows the relocation of the Carteret Islanders, a community living on a remote island chain in the South Pacific Ocean, and now, some of the world’s first environmental refugees. When climate change threatens their survival, the islanders face a painful decision. They must leave their ancestral land in search of a new place to call home. "Sun Come Up" follows a group of young islanders as they search for land and build relationships in war-torn Bougainville, 50 miles across the open ocean.

Penn State faculty Lara Fowler (Law and Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment) and Sinfree Makoni (Applied Linguistics and African Studies) along with visiting professor Richard Mbih (African Studies) will lead the panel discussion. Sophia McClennen, director of CGS and associate director of SIA, will moderate the discussion.

In celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the United Nations, the PSU United Nations Campus Advocates is hosting a debate on the future of the United Nations - how it can be effective in the coming years in the face of internal challenges and criticisms and accomplish the new Sustainable Development Goals. The debate panel includes faculty and students, moderated and hosted by the President and Vice-President of the Penn State United Nations Campus Advocates.

Dr. Gladney in his research has examined the variety of Islamic experiences in Asia and argues that there is a distinctly “Asian Islam.” His talk will focus on the widely dispersed Uyghur diaspora which has become increasingly connected and engaged in advocacy on behalf of the plight of the 10 million Uyghurs still under a steadily repressive Chinese rule in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province (also known as Eastern Turkestan). In his talk Gladney will examine not only the globalization of China’s “Xinjiang problem,” but also the role of global social media and Western scholarship in shaping and interpreting Eastern Turkestani “separatism” in China.

Dru C. Gladney is Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College in Claremont, California. In addition to a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle, Dr. Gladney has three M.A. degrees in religion and philosophy. He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar in Turkey and China, and has held faculty positions and post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, the University of Hawai’i and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Inaugural Dean of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, he has also recently served as President of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College. He is author of the award-winning book, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic (Harvard University Press, 1996, 1st edition 1991) as well as Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality (Wadsworth, 1998); Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the U.S. (Editor, Stanford University Press, 1998); and Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Sub-Altern Subjects (Chicago University Press, 2004). He has testified to the US Congress and Senate on numerous occasions regarding China’s human rights record and treatment of Muslim minorities. His research has been regularly featured in interviews on CNN, BBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, and in Newsweek, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.

This talk is sponsored by the Departments of History, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Penn State Libraries, and the Center of Global Studies.

“The only sensible weapon against the cops,” Chris Marker presciently claimed in the 1960s, is “a film camera.” Exploring the ramifications of this statement in the context of the current struggles around the racial violence perpetrated by the police and vigilantes, this paper proposes a broad reflection on the social pragmatics of photography and its consequences. It begins by revisiting the question ‘what is photography?’ by inquiring into its supposed privileged relationship to the objective world. It argues that photography, far from simply capturing reality, is a powerful remaking machine that recomposes the very nature of the real. By resituating the photographic apparatus in a broad social pragmatics, it thereby seeks to elucidate its political power as a “sensible weapon.”

Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and the Director of the Atelier de Théorie Critique in Paris. He is the author, most notably, of Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (forthcoming), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire (2010).

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

As U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan from March 2011 to March 2013, Ambassador Lyman led U.S. policy in helping in the implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. His lecture will be followed by a Q&A.

In languages with lexical stress it is common to observe stress-induced effects on vowel quality and duration. In some of these languages, the effect is very salient, as we find a reduced vowel inventory in unstressed syllables (phonological vowel reduction). In other languages, effects on vowel quality may only result in slight phonetic variation (phonetic vowel reduction). Experimental evidence for phonetic vowel reduction from English has led to the postulation of two general (partially conflicting) hypotheses of how vowel production is affected by the absence or presence of prosodic prominence. This talk explores prosodically-induced phonetic variation in vowel production in two Ibero-Romance languages, Iberian Spanish (5 vowels in both stressed and unstressed position) and Central Catalan (7 vowels in stressed position, 3 in unstressed position). More specifically, this study examines how vowel quality is affected by absence of lexical stress, intonational pitch accent, and decreased duration due to faster speech rate in two languages which differ in the number of vowel contrasts they exhibit as well as in the existence of phonological vowel reduction. Results are evaluated in the light of the above-mentioned hypotheses of speech production. The instability of certain vowel contrasts in prosodically-prominent positions in Catalan, traditionally attributed to influence of Spanish, will also be discussed.

Marianna Nadeu is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at Penn State. She holds a PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she specialized in acoustic and articulatory phonetics and laboratory phonology. Her research focuses on the phonetic effects of prosody at the segmental level in Romance languages, as well as in mechanisms and processes of speech enhancement and reduction more generally. Her research and teaching interests also include historical linguistics (especially sound change), contact linguistics, and bilingualism.

This lecture is a part of the Center for Global Studies Lecture series which focuses on interdisciplinary research.

The Wooster Group incorporated digital media and new technologies as part of their method of rehearsing and performing in a number of productions based on classics, including Hamlet (2007). Hamlet involves repetition of their own scores, which are already reenactments/recreations of scores of actors’ live performances in Richard Burton’sHamlet captured on film. In this talk, I also discuss how the use of digital media in live performance offers us a way to simultaneously explore the fragmented layers of Shakespeare’s text in multiple mediums.

Serap Erincin is a performance artist, director and writer who has lived and worked in Istanbul, London, New York, and Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State. She is the winner of various awards and fellowships and has published on performance and politics, especially with regard to human rights violations, as well as experimental dance and theatre. She is also the editor of Solum and Other Plays from Turkey and the writer and director of plays such as Inside “Out”, Connected, and Atrocity Boulevard.

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

Michael Gaw will talk about his career path, the challenges he faced, and how he was ultimately able to combine his interests in government, finance and foreign affairs into a career with the federal government. His lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Anyone interested in a career in law, public interest, government, and/ or foreign affairs is encouraged to attend.

In this current position as an assistant director in the Division of Trading and Markets, Gaw works on issues relating to trading rules and trade reporting for equities, fixed income and derivative securities. Currently, he is the project manager for the SEC’s implementation of new rules that require derivatives trades to be publicly disseminated, as are stock trades.

Gaw has represented the SEC at international meetings in Spain, France and Germany. He graduated from Harvard College with bachelor of arts in social studies and the University of Cambridge with a master of philosophy in European studies. He earned his juris doctorate from Boston College Law School.

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

This paper discusses the surrealist magazine Minotaure (1933-1939) and other productions of the French avant-garde in the 1930s, such as Georges Bataille’s magazine Acéphale, as intense critical investigations into the notion of the human and of humanism.The universal human quality explored in these publications is no longer a rational harmonious figure at the center of the world but rather a being at once open to the animal- and object-realms, sharing with them certain modes of perception and qualities previously viewed as pre-human or inhuman. The elaboration of this new human hinges on the transformation of the classical tradition, of “Greece” from a humanistic topos of universality into a new cultural code for “the world.” This leads to a striking new understanding of humanism, one that is no less encompassing than its Renaissance and Enlightenment predecessors, but no longer anthropocentric in the same ways.The new non-anthropocentric humanism that results from these displacements invites humans into a different relationship with the world, but also encodes a specific political position during the 1930s, one that stand against the totalitarian regimes and their regulation of what stands as "human." Against this background, what these avant-garde publications propose is an alternative universalism as a critic of Western thought, articulated on an intense experimentation with the human figure.

Effie Rentzou is an Associate Professor of French Literature in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. She studies avant-garde and modernist literature and art, and particularly poetics, the relation between image and text, social analysis of literature, politics and literature, and the internationalization of the avant-garde. Her first book, Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la transformation du littéraire (2010) examines the construction of literary phenomena in the production of an anti-literary movement, surrealism. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Concepts of the World: Avant-garde and the Idea of the International that explores the conceptualization of the “world” in the work and activities of writers and artists within and around historical avant-garde movements – futurism, dada, and surrealism – during the period 1900-1940.

This lecture is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon series, a weekly informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty, and other members of the University community featuring a presentation on a topic related to any humanities discipline.

A Penn State performance of the play "Reclaiming the P…Word," a riveting and award-winning work written and originally performed by students, faculty and staff at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, is an initiative to combat sexual violence on their campus. The play confronts the terms commonly used as insults and curses based on demeaning words for women's bodies (the "p..word" refers to such a slur) that distort gender relations and normalize the public denigration of women, and instead creates new languages for envisioning women's bodies, producing a resonant vision of power and pleasure.

A Penn State performance of the play "Reclaiming the P…Word," a riveting and award-winning work written and originally performed by students, faculty and staff at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, is an initiative to combat sexual violence on their campus. The play confronts the terms commonly used as insults and curses based on demeaning words for women's bodies (the "p..word" refers to such a slur) that distort gender relations and normalize the public denigration of women, and instead creates new languages for envisioning women's bodies, producing a resonant vision of power and pleasure.

Prajit K. Dutta is the Managing Partner in the Aicon group of companies (Aicon Galleries & Aicon Funds) that has included two galleries – Aicon, New York and Aicon, London and three private equity funds. Aicon Galleries represents the top Indian artists including M F Husain, S H Raza, Tyeb Mehta and F N Souza as well as other leading Pan-Asian masters like Sadequain, Rasheed Araeen and Charles Hossein Zenderoudi. Aicon has worked with major museums such as the Guggenheim, Art Institute, Chicago, Metropolitan Museum and the Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi. The galleries have been profiled in the New York Times, Guardian, TIME and other leading news outlets. Aicon Galleries is the home of the Herwitz Collection. More information on its activities can be found at www.aicongallery.com Aicon Funds runs art funds, private equity vehicles that buy and sell art.

In 2014, the Aicon group launched two projects to provide affordable housing in India. The projects are situated in Ahmedabad and Indore. The company hopes to take the initiative nationwide.

Prajit K. Dutta is also Professor of Economics at Columbia University where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of Strategies and Games: Theory and Practice (MIT Press, 1999) and numerous research articles. His research interests are in Game Theory and its Applications. He is currently doing research in the Economics of Climate Change as well as on Asynchronous Games with applications to Bargaining and Foreign Aid. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree from the University of Delhi.